After we're done warning the kids about what they put on MySpace, maybe we'd better say something to the adults, too.
Did the top editor at a small Indiana newspaper lose his job because of a Myspace.com profile? He says, "Yes."
[. . .]
In May, Jackson took his interest in Myspace.com a step further, creating his own profile page, where he began posting poetry, chapters of a novel he had written, and what he described as "humor writing." He also mentioned a song parody, "The Rectal of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
"Some of my humor writing, I admit, is sophomoric," he admitted. The ex-editor claims Gannett officials who fired him mentioned the profile "had some sexual content." But he believes anything sexual on the page came from someone else posting an item.
"I didn't put anything salacious in there," Jackson said. He said he closed down his Myspace.com page and profile in mid-June, a month before his firing. Also, the Palladium-Item's MySpace page did not link to his personal page.
Of course, nobody still at the paper is talking, so we're left only with Jackson's opinion that MySpace led to his downfall. The paper's strategy of creating a MySpace page to attract area teens is interesting, but I don't know how successful it will be. Just because the kids see something about the paper there, that doesn't mean they'll believe it has anything of interest for them.
